Lenny Megliola: Red Sox always look different in the playoffs

Saturday

Sep 27, 2008 at 12:01 AMSep 27, 2008 at 2:10 AM

It has become part of the autumn landscape now, a reasonable expectation. Yes, Fenway Park stays open, allowing the Red Sox to traipse through another postseason, five seasons now, out of the last six.

Lenny Megliola

It has become part of the autumn landscape now, a reasonable expectation. Yes, Fenway Park stays open, allowing the Red Sox to traipse through another postseason, five seasons now, out of the last six.

Have you stopped to think how lucky you are? Not only do the Sox get to playoffs, they don’t know how to lose a World Series game when they get that far. Winning the 2004 World Series ended Boston’s long, suffocating wait; in ’07 it was like, hey, why not win another one? Those parades are pretty cool.

Now they get another shot. It’s always open to debate whether the Red Sox are appropriately equipped to proceed deep into the playoffs. Over 162 games, you get a pretty clear picture of a team. Three-out-of-five and four-out-of-seven series are entirely another matter.

Every year, the Red Sox look different in the playoffs. Pedro Martinez, Orlando Cabrera and Derek Lowe surrendered their clubhouse space after the epic ’04 season. Kevin Millar, Johnny Damon and Bill Mueller left the year after, and you got the idea that nothing, not even winning the World Series, could convince general manager Theo Epstein to just kick back and soak up the love. He’s won two now, and he’s still clinging to the philosophy of change.

How’s this team different than last year’s at this time? Jason Bay, Mark Kotsay and Justin Masterson weren’t here. Jed Lowrie might have been hoping to get a September call up. Instead, he wound up the regular shortstop. It’s been such a good audition for Lowrie that no one seemed terribly concerned if the injured Julio Lugo was coming back or not. You got the feeling everybody wanted to go with the kid.

Manny Ramirez WAS here, until he didn’t want to be, and management, with a sigh of relief, showed Mercurial Manny the door and called him a cab as the trade deadline struck midnight. Now, his name comes up mostly in the context of a possible Red Sox-Dodgers World Series. Would Manny get his revenge or will the Red Sox have the last laugh, and another title?

Manny back at Fenway this soon, what a trip that would be.

But that’s looking too far down the road. Right now, the Red Sox want to see if Mike Lowell and J.D. Drew can get, and stay, healthy. Except for a bullpen decision or two, the pitching is set.

It’s been a curious season. If you’d known Manny would be wearing Dodger blue the last two months and that the wrist-hampered David Ortiz wouldn’t reach 25 homers or 95 RBI, it would have been fair to ask where the punch would come from.

And if a little birdie whispered, “Don’t worry, it’ll come from Dustin Pedroia and Kevin Youkilis,” you would’ve thought that was funny.

Sure, Youkilis was a hard worker and Pedroia a ferocious one with a rookie of the year plaque still warm in his den. But no one thought Youklis could script a season like this. And no one back in March had Pedroia on the short list of MVP candidates. League, not team.

So it was these two, with 198 RBI and 98 doubles going into Saturday’s action, who rose up when the Manny/Big Papi combo broke down.

Youkilis and Pedroia will have to keep it up in October, particularly if Drew breaks down again and Lowell’s hip flares. But let’s not dismiss what Ortiz has done in playoffs past, and might again.

As for x factors, everybody’s an x factor going into the playoffs. Regular season numbers don’t always square in October (see: A. Rodriguez).

Still, here are a few Red Sox x factors. Lowrie, because he’s a first-timer around this kind of pressure; Ellsbury, because he took to the playoffs like an infant to a mother’s milk, but did he just catch lightning in a bottle? We’ll see.

Maybe we’ll see a lot: baseball in Boston beyond Columbus Day and edging towards Halloween. No way of telling where the great mysteries and drama of the postseason will steer the Red Sox, but we’re accustomed now to having them invited to the party.

After 162 games, that’s good enough.

Lenny Megliola is a Daily News columnist. His e-mail is lennymegs@aol.com.

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